Workshop: Frontiers in Environmental Education

研讨会：环境教育前沿

• 批准号: 0618005
• 负责人: James Kilduff
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-09-01 至 2008-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0618005&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Workshop; Frontiers; Environmental; Education

0618005KilduffThe field of environmental engineering developed from its roots in civil engineering and its sub-discipline sanitary engineering as the era of concern about the large-scale effects of human activity on environmental quality began in the 1960s. Environmental engineering thus always has had a focus on civil infrastructure and public health engineering--specifically on techniques to provide safe drinking water and treat municipal wastewater. Expansion of sanitary engineering into the field of environmental engineering involved three major paradigm shifts. First, the focus of concern expanded beyond directly protecting humans from the effects of water pollution to also protecting/remediating water in the natural environment (aquatic ecosystems). Second, the effects of pollutants on other environmental media--air and land resources--and control of pollutant emissions to those media were added to the long-standing focus on water quality engineering. Third, a recognition of the complexity of physical, chemical, and biological processes that affect pollutant behavior in the environment--and the need to understand those processes to design appropriate engineering solutions--led to a strong emphasis on science in the developing field of environmental engineering. As such, the field developed with a strongly interdisciplinary flavor and strong links to many fields of science as well as to several major fields of engineering. Over the past 50 years, the field's focus on solving pollution problems by "end-of-pip" solutions gradually expanded to include concepts of source control, pollution prevention, and industrial ecology. Researchers in environmental engineering also have been quick to adapt cutting-edge technical developments in other fields of engineering and the basic sciences such that research in the field today bears scant relation to the practice of past decades. Nonetheless, environmental engineers are concerned that undergraduate and graduate curricula of environmental engineering programs in American universities have not changed sufficiently to reflect these developments. In addition, there are concerns about the widely varying content and breadth of programs called environmental engineering. Consequently, a group of environmental engineering faculty, led by the principal investigator, concluded that it was timely to critically examine the curriculum content and educational goals of environmental engineering programs at U.S. universities as the basis for developing a "core body of knowledge" In turn, this could lead to a core curriculum for environmental engineering programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In cooperation with the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, a planning committee will organize and conduct a workshop to examine these and related issues. The workshop tentatively is scheduled for early January 2007. It also will assess new curricular and educational opportunities in the context of ABET requirements, and developments in other relevant fields, such as biotechnology, nano-science and technology, and cyberinfrastructure.

环境工程领域是在20世纪60年代开始关注人类活动对环境质量的大规模影响时，从土木工程及其分支学科卫生工程中发展起来的。因此，环境工程一直把重点放在民用基础设施和公共卫生工程上--特别是提供安全饮用水和处理城市污水的技术。卫生工程向环境工程领域的扩展涉及三个主要的范式转变。首先，关注的焦点不仅仅是直接保护人类免受水污染的影响，还包括保护/修复自然环境(水生生态系统)中的水。其次，污染物对其他环境介质--空气和土地资源--的影响，以及对这些介质污染物排放的控制，被添加到水质工程的长期关注中。第三，认识到影响环境中污染物行为的物理、化学和生物过程的复杂性--以及需要了解这些过程以设计适当的工程解决方案--导致在发展中的环境工程领域强烈强调科学。因此，该领域的发展带有强烈的跨学科色彩，并与许多科学领域以及几个主要的工程领域建立了强有力的联系。在过去的50年里，该领域的重点逐渐扩大到通过“管道末端”解决方案来解决污染问题，包括源头控制、污染预防和工业生态的概念。环境工程的研究人员也迅速适应了其他工程和基础科学领域的尖端技术发展，以至于今天该领域的研究与过去几十年的实践几乎没有关系。尽管如此，环境工程师担心，美国大学环境工程专业的本科生和研究生课程没有做出足够的改变，以反映这些发展。此外，还有人担心被称为环境工程的课程内容和广度千差万别。因此，由首席调查员领导的一组环境工程教员得出结论，认为现在是时候对美国大学环境工程专业的课程内容和教育目标进行批判性审查，作为开发“核心知识体系”的基础，这可能导致研究生和本科生水平的环境工程课程的核心课程。一个规划委员会将与环境工程和科学教授协会合作，组织和举办一次研讨会，审查这些问题和相关问题。讲习班暂定于2007年1月初举行。它还将评估在教唆要求的背景下新的课程和教育机会，以及其他相关领域的发展，如生物技术、纳米科学和技术以及网络基础设施。